Tom Stoppard author page

Tom Stoppard biography

Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He was born in Zlín, then in Czechoslovakia.

In 1939 his family moved to Singapore to escape Nazi occupation, and later were evacuated to Darjeeling, India. His father died during the escape; his mother remarried a British army officer, Kenneth Stoppard, who gave Stoppard his surname.

The family settled in England in 1946. Stoppard left school at age 17 and became a journalist, then drama critic. His first completed stage play was A Walk on the Water, later retitled Enter a Free Man, first produced in 1968.

Stoppard’s best-known plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982) and Arcadia (1993). He has also written screenplays for films including Brazil (1985), The Russia House (1990), and Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Stoppard was knighted in 1997 for his services to drama. One of his recent major plays, Leopoldstadt, premiered in January 2020.